SWIFT's Standards Forum, now in its tenth year, has become an institution in its own right, with its own branding, logo, and budget.

The week-long affair held at SWIFT's annual Sibos gathering each year is the poster-child for all events in the annual standards calendar. Thankfully, SWIFT offers a number of regional events throughout the year, giving it an opportunity to reach a broader audience, including those not fortunate enough to attend Sibos.

This year the SWIFT Standards Team is hosting Standards Forum events in New York, Frankfurt, Stockholm, plus a couple of yet-to-be-announced locations in Asia. The New York event, to be held on March 7 at the Federal Reserve, immediately following SWIFT's SOFA event the prior day, will begin with an "ISO 20022 cooking class" over morning coffee. Attendees can anticipate an analogy to cooking: how message standards (read: ingredients) can be cobbled together according to a recipe of rules and guidelines to make delicious messages. So when the food is ready, how do we force people to eat it?

That's just the first question financial firms should ask. Here are a handful of reasons they should ask a few more.

2- The Standards Forum really kicks off with an introduction from Richard Dzina, senior vice president at the New York Fed and Chris Church, head of SWIFT Americas. Their presentations are followed by a session entitled "Adopting ISO 20022", in which we will likely hear about how ISO 20022 is being used elsewhere, by initiatives such as T2S, SEPA, and JASDEC. We'll also hear about Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.'s corporate actions reengineering initiative. The common theme in all these projects is the presence of a big stick. A government or a quasi-monopolistic utility has come along and said "this is the way it's going to be." The DTCC deserves an enormous pat on the back for taking the first leap in the US market. So going forward, who will assume ownership of the big stick in the US market? Who has the power to wield it?

3- One of the chat sessions at the standards event, "Regulatory Changes Impacting Standards," could be the subject of an entire conference all by itself. At the very least one should expect lots of references to LEIs (short for Legal Entity Identifiers), UPIs (short for uniform product identifiers) product taxonomies, trade repositories, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and European Market Infrastructure Regulation. Globally, there are 24 trade repositories all accepting data in multiple different syntaxes; FpML, FIX, SWIFT MT, proprietary. Therefore, does SWIFT see this as the perfect opportunity to align numerous message syntaxes with a common underlying data model? ISO 20022 is the obvious choice, but regulators must see that too.

4- Another of the chat sessions at the Standards Forum, entitled "ISO 20022 portfolio for payments and securities," will be a crawl across the ISO 20022 catalogue of messages. They now weigh in at over 300 and counting. The figure is quite impressive really when you think about it. We might hear about variants and extensions to the ISO standards to keep the discussion interesting. One assumes that market participants need a set of messages representing their entire business process before they can even entertain thoughts of migrating to ISO 20022. So, why are there no FX and Treasury messages in ISO 20022's massive catalogue?

5- For the chat session entitled "Facilitating easy implementation with MyStandards", I might take exception to the choice of the word "easy". When I first saw MyStandards I thought I had died and gone to standards heaven. I have been asking for a means by which to validate at the level of market practice for years and MyStandards will really be a game-changer. It's easy to see how MyStandards will improve the process of documenting market practice and bank-specific message requirements, and it's easy to see how it will improve the message development cycles. However, what about run-time? Does SWIFT expect MyStandards to make operational improvements, and if so, how will we measure the impact to straight through processing rates?

6- The standards meeting will be rounded off by a panel of big-hitters from

the payments world, moderated by Roy DeCicco, who is a co-chair of the Payments Market Practice Group. The panel is entitled "ISO 20022 for the US Payments marketplace", with a subtitle of "Why, Whether, and When". Well, after 10 years of talking about ISO 20022 in every single Standards Forum I would hope that by now the "why" question is a no-brainer. The US is looking around, somewhat enviously I might suggest, to see what Europe, Canada, Australia and others are doing with ISO 20022. Therefore, I expect the answer to the question of whether to be fairly easy. Yes.

This leaves us with the final question to ask: When will ISO 20022 be adopted for the US payments marketplace? In case the answer is not forthcoming and you can't tell us when, can you tell us when you can tell us when?

At the 2010 Standards Forum in Amsterdam there was a tagline contest. My entry was "ISO 20022 – making the right thing to do the easiest thing to do". To this day I maintain it should have won! On reflection, maybe not. Maybe this was just a bit ahead of its time. Perhaps migrating to ISO 20022 wasn't the easiest thing for everyone to do back in 2010. But what about now? Surely with all the modern technologies and fancy new tools making things so easy there is absolutely no reason why the answer to the "when" question shouldn't be 2013.

Mr. Goswell is the principal consultant for Incept5, a San Francisco-based consultancy specializing in data integration and message transformation.

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SWIFT's Standards Forum, now in its tenth year, has become an institution in its own right, with its own branding, logo, and budget.

The week-long affair held at SWIFT's annual Sibos gathering each year is the poster-child for all events in the annual standards calendar. Thankfully, SWIFT offers a number of regional events throughout the year, giving it an opportunity to reach a broader audience, including those not fortunate enough to attend Sibos.

This year the SWIFT Standards Team is hosting Standards Forum events in New York, Frankfurt, Stockholm, plus a couple of yet-to-be-announced locations in Asia. The New York event, to be held on March 7 at the Federal Reserve, immediately following SWIFT's SOFA event the prior day, will begin with an "ISO 20022 cooking class" over morning coffee. Attendees can anticipate an analogy to cooking: how message standards (read: ingredients) can be cobbled together according to a recipe of rules and guidelines to make delicious messages. So when the food is ready, how do we force people to eat it?

That's just the first question financial firms should ask. Here are a handful of reasons they should ask a few more.

2- The Standards Forum really kicks off with an introduction from Richard Dzina, senior vice president at the New York Fed and Chris Church, head of SWIFT Americas. Their presentations are followed by a session entitled "Adopting ISO 20022", in which we will likely hear about how ISO 20022 is being used elsewhere, by initiatives such as T2S, SEPA, and JASDEC. We'll also hear about Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.'s corporate actions reengineering initiative. The common theme in all these projects is the presence of a big stick. A government or a quasi-monopolistic utility has come along and said "this is the way it's going to be." The DTCC deserves an enormous pat on the back for taking the first leap in the US market. So going forward, who will assume ownership of the big stick in the US market? Who has the power to wield it?

3- One of the chat sessions at the standards event, "Regulatory Changes Impacting Standards," could be the subject of an entire conference all by itself. At the very least one should expect lots of references to LEIs (short for Legal Entity Identifiers), UPIs (short for uniform product identifiers) product taxonomies, trade repositories, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and European Market Infrastructure Regulation. Globally, there are 24 trade repositories all accepting data in multiple different syntaxes; FpML, FIX, SWIFT MT, proprietary. Therefore, does SWIFT see this as the perfect opportunity to align numerous message syntaxes with a common underlying data model? ISO 20022 is the obvious choice, but regulators must see that too.

4- Another of the chat sessions at the Standards Forum, entitled "ISO 20022 portfolio for payments and securities," will be a crawl across the ISO 20022 catalogue of messages. They now weigh in at over 300 and counting. The figure is quite impressive really when you think about it. We might hear about variants and extensions to the ISO standards to keep the discussion interesting. One assumes that market participants need a set of messages representing their entire business process before they can even entertain thoughts of migrating to ISO 20022. So, why are there no FX and Treasury messages in ISO 20022's massive catalogue?

5- For the chat session entitled "Facilitating easy implementation with MyStandards", I might take exception to the choice of the word "easy". When I first saw MyStandards I thought I had died and gone to standards heaven. I have been asking for a means by which to validate at the level of market practice for years and MyStandards will really be a game-changer. It's easy to see how MyStandards will improve the process of documenting market practice and bank-specific message requirements, and it's easy to see how it will improve the message development cycles. However, what about run-time? Does SWIFT expect MyStandards to make operational improvements, and if so, how will we measure the impact to straight through processing rates?

6- The standards meeting will be rounded off by a panel of big-hitters from

the payments world, moderated by Roy DeCicco, who is a co-chair of the Payments Market Practice Group. The panel is entitled "ISO 20022 for the US Payments marketplace", with a subtitle of "Why, Whether, and When". Well, after 10 years of talking about ISO 20022 in every single Standards Forum I would hope that by now the "why" question is a no-brainer. The US is looking around, somewhat enviously I might suggest, to see what Europe, Canada, Australia and others are doing with ISO 20022. Therefore, I expect the answer to the question of whether to be fairly easy. Yes.

This leaves us with the final question to ask: When will ISO 20022 be adopted for the US payments marketplace? In case the answer is not forthcoming and you can't tell us when, can you tell us when you can tell us when?

At the 2010 Standards Forum in Amsterdam there was a tagline contest. My entry was "ISO 20022 – making the right thing to do the easiest thing to do". To this day I maintain it should have won! On reflection, maybe not. Maybe this was just a bit ahead of its time. Perhaps migrating to ISO 20022 wasn't the easiest thing for everyone to do back in 2010. But what about now? Surely with all the modern technologies and fancy new tools making things so easy there is absolutely no reason why the answer to the "when" question shouldn't be 2013.

Mr. Goswell is the principal consultant for Incept5, a San Francisco-based consultancy specializing in data integration and message transformation.